


Restoration and Rectification

by kormantic



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Broken Harbour, Faithful Place, Gen, In The Woods, The Likeness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/kormantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cassie knows something about labyrinths in the dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restoration and Rectification

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueteak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueteak/gifts).



The Spain trial was grinding on and I was at the Trocadero, at a smart table set with crisp white linen and real silver. It’s not in my budget, usually. It seems I’ve decided to carve into savings as part of my plan to crumple up my career and toss it in the bin. Dina would like that, I think. I should bring her next time. She can have the risotto and I’ll have the duck again. She can charm the bartender for cocktails. Maybe she’ll take him home with her as a nightcap.

My phone rang; I’d forgotten to turn it off, and I answered out of habit.

“Scorcher, me lad. What’s happened to all your prompt ways?”

I’d been resolutely ignoring texts as I made my way through my savory roast duck and spiced red cabbage. The last three had been from Mackey, for reasons best known to himself.

_hello Scorcher how’s Laura not engaged to a handsome doctor then_

_you read accounting if memory serves I may have a job for you_

_give us a call_

I finished swallowing my morsel of duck and he gave a sly little chuckle.

“I’ve caught you at your tea. No matter – time is clicking on, and I require your estimable skills. How’s that for an offer?”

“Undercover? Undercover for Frank _Mackey?_ What could I have done to earn such grace?”

“Well, I wanted a grab at you before you chuck it at the Squad, of course.”

I stilled, eyes on a little lagoon of gravy curving around an island of shredded cabbage.

“What gave you the idea that I was leaving Murder?”

“A little bird told me.”

Dina was more likely than O’Kelly, who I doubt would open the door to Francis Mackey without an official writ. Dina had liked Frank a good deal when we were at college, more to twit me than because he was anything like her type. And Frank is as charming as the very devil himself when he’s of a mind to be, and he’d always liked the girls before he married Olivia.

O’Kelly hasn’t tried again to ask me to rescind my impending resignation, but he’s been working up to it, I can see it in the set of his shoulders.

“A change is as good as a rest,” continued Frank piously. “And there’s a fair bit of forensic accounting to get up to in my section as well. Might be as you’ll find it to your taste. You like things to line up right.” He said it to insult me, but I take statements like that as highest praise. Professional conduct is its own reward.

“Room for one more?”

A slim young woman stood before me in a red zippered jacket with the hood tugged up to cover her hair. She had one hand on the carved back of the handsome oak dining chair and a questioning look in her dark eyes.

“That’ll be Cassie,” said Frank’s voice against my ear.

“You sent someone to talk me into working for you?”

“I did. I like to get my way and my agents are _everywhere_ ,” Mackey said darkly, before snickering into the phone and ringing off.

Cassie Maddox, late of Murder Squad herself, was a bit of a nonsequitur. After all, she didn’t work for Mackey – she was in Domestic Violence, last I’d heard. And she was just married, so it wasn’t as if Mackey had sent her in to seduce me. Not that she was the sort to tempt me, as she settled down without waiting for my permission, and dropped her hood to reveal a mazy head of disordered curls. She didn’t have on so much as a smudge of lipgloss, and she looked unnervingly young, though she must have been thirty if a day.

A waiter hove into view, straightbacked and personable, asking her order. As she waited for her hot whiskey, she laid the linen napkin in her lap and toyed with the silverware.

“You look well. How is marriage treating you?” There was no reason not to be polite.

She grinned at me, after glancing down at the narrow band on her finger, next to the spark of her engagement ring.

“Frank tells me we have you to thank for the silver dish.”

I blinked at her, confused for a moment.

“You mean the chafing dish?” I’d picked it out of a catalogue. It was identical to the one Laura and I had received from Geri.

“Is that what it’s called?”

“You make omelets in it. I would have gotten it engraved, but you hadn’t announced your dates yet.”

It was plain that she was laughing at me, but she struggled to be polite and only said faintly, “Sam will know what to make of it, I’m sure.”

“If you say so. He’s a good detective.” He worked hard to follow the rules, and I respected him for it.

“He is,” Cassie agreed. “He’s partnered with Stephen Moran now. Had you heard that?”

I had. No matter what had happened at Faithful Place, Stephen had been overdue for his shot at Murder.

“Stephen ran into Richie Curran on a car stop looking for that Glasnevin slasher.”

“I thought he’d left to join a road crew.” That was what Quigley had said. Not that he ever said anything worth listening to.

“No, he’s still a constable. Stephen says he may even make sergeant again one day.” She didn’t ask why he’d been set back in uniform. I knew, which was enough, and she would have guessed it. Quigley’s slanderous tongue was in everyone’s ear, like it or not. Although it can’t be slander if it’s true enough.

The restaurant was full of low lanterns and subdued conversation, the clink of china cups in painted saucers. Cassie looked out of place here, with her outsized jacket and her ruffled hair, like a student who knew she couldn’t actually afford to order from the menu. But the table’s lone candle was kind to her, softening her sharp little face and making her eyes huge.

A few tables over, a young family was seated - a rather fat mother, but pretty enough, with careful hair and skillful eyeliner. Her husband was faintly balding and had a belly straining at his jumper as if he would have the next baby. Their gabbling, restless child was three or four, with a thatch of dark curls that made her look as though she could be Cassie’s own. We caught each other looking over, and maybe she saw my thoughts, because she ducked her head and smoothed the napkin in her lap.

“Frank is offering you a way out that may lead back in, later. He’s good at that. That’s what he did for me, after Vestal.”

“Because Mirror went _so_ well for you,” I said snidely. Undercover. You can’t plan for every contingency, and you can’t count on luck to counteract the unpredictability of humanity at its roughest edges. She’d had to shoot her way out of it, and had killed a man doing so.

She actually laughed a little, a springy two note giggle, and she shook her head.

“You wouldn’t know it, because he’s a bit of a bastard, really, but he believes in the work. As much as you. On top of that, Frank believes that sacrifices for the job should be honored.” She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows at me, and I thought again of the little tousled head a few tables over. “And debts paid.”

Broken Harbour had been my best chance to rally after Mackey had stabbed me in the back in Faithful Place, and it had turned my future inside out, instead. If this was Mackey apologizing in his crooked, Liberties way...

“He knows you had your heart set on being Super one day. Says you would’ve done, too, but for some... bad luck.”

If Mackey and I shared anything, it was the belief that there was no such thing as bad luck, only bad planning and bad company. Bad luck was as rare an animal as the innocent victim. Of course, Broken Harbour had shown me one _and_ the other. I remembered the photographs of Rosie Daly on her mother’s mantle. Maybe he and I had seen the same unicorn, and it had made its mark on Mackey, too.

Throughout our conversation, Cassie had continued to meddle with her tableware, at last setting her silver spoon across mine so it formed an X. Then she fished a chocolate bar out of her red hoodie, the kind you get at a shop for 59p while you buy your lotto ticket, and set it on top of the spoons like a hot dish on a trivet. She had an air of challenge, as if the Dairy Milk was a stack of cards and we were to play a hand of high stakes poker.

Like some brand of amateur magician, she produced a little bouquet of paper flowers from her jacket sleeve. They were twisted to look like roses, red and white. She smiled at me, and her eyes gleamed as she said, “Restoration and rectification.” Then she locked her great dark eyes on me and tipped the flowers into the long flame of the table’s candle. My ears were roaring, and I felt every eye in the place graze my back like wet feathers against my skin, staring over at the mad girl setting things on fire, but she kept my gaze as she burned them, and they went up in little darting flares, golden and gone in an instant, until she dropped the smouldering paper stems into her nearly-empty glass. With a tiny blue roar, the last of the whiskey burned all to a crisp of ash.

“Now eat up your chockablock,” she commanded imperiously, as if _I_ was the recalcitrant child.

“I haven’t finished my dinner. It’s cold, too,” I said, making it clear whose fault that was.

“Just a nip,” Cassie insisted, and with my ears still hot, I tore at the wrapper and took a grudging bite, as I might have done for Dina. It was waxy and clashed with the cabbage.

“Now, then.” She shoved her chair back and sprang to her feet as light as a fairy. Tucking her hood up again, she touched my shoulder briefly with one fine-boned hand. “Call your wife and our Frank, too. You’ve lost your muffler,” she said grandly, tossing a tenner down for her whiskey and taking her leave.

It was an odd thing to say, as I haven’t worn my ring since the divorce, and my muffler had been hanging on a hook beside her, a dove grey cashmere, draped over the clean lines of my black Burberry.

*

The Spain case has come and gone, and it ended as you might think. It’s been three months since I submitted a transfer request instead of a resignation, and O’Kelly took it with good grace.

As Mackey thought it might, forensic accounting suits me very well, and after my very brief stint juggling the books for some very nasty characters, I hardly see Frank at all. I do spend a fair bit of time in court, wearing my best suits and making sure that things line up right before I submit my testimonies. It is reassuringly, even blessedly, boring. Dina picks at me about it, but it is satisfying work, and my conviction rates have never been higher.

Laura, Geri tells me, has not yet married her doctor. Dina tells me it’s a sign and that I should “stick your nose in, as you’re so good at it”. I have not decided.

Dina would probably tell me that Cassie Maddox is a fairy, or a unicorn herself, or at the least a magician in her own right.

Somehow that night, she had found me a new route through the tangled mess of my future, with only a bar of chocolate and a golden light in the dark.

END

If I believed in curses, I would believe that this is mine: when it matters most, in the moments when I know with the greatest clarity exactly what needs to be done, everything I say comes out wrong. – _Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy, Broken Harbour_

Cassie’s Restoration and Rectification ritual suggested by Clarke’s _Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell_, which someone who wanted marvels would have surely read. It would make her laugh to think of Frank as The Raven King.

 

**Author's Note:**

> A billion thanks to Alyx and Kelly for superb instant beta. I hope this is fits the bill, blueteak!


End file.
